ONE can't help but marvel in awe at the remarkable story of Leonie Muller, a young German woman who made international headlines this week after it was revealed she had ditched her Stuttgart flat for an unlimited rail travel pass and was living on board high-speed trains.

The 23-year-old student coined the idea after a dispute with her landlady. It made financial sense: her monthly rent was £290 while surfing Germany's rail network worked out at £250.

Ms Muller now spends her time travelling between university in Tubingen, her boyfriend's flat in Cologne and her mother's home in Berlin, clocking up between 750 and 1,250 miles each week.

All she totes is a change of clothes, a tablet computer and a washbag. The rest of her belongings are in storage.

Granted, Ms Muller rarely sleeps on board – preferring to sofa surf with friends and family – but she does write all of her essays using Deutsche Bahn's excellent WiFi, washes her hair in the train loos (the 35-minute stretch between Mannheim and Stuttgart allows time to luxuriate over her toilette) and revels in the diverse mix of people and places she encounters along the way.

What an adventure. I feel quite envious at her free-living, nomadic existence. Then my mind snaps back into focus when I think about travelling between Glasgow Queen Street and Edinburgh Waverley during rush hour. An experience described by one passenger in recent days as resembling "the last plane out of Saigon".

Seats are more elusive than Lord Lucan. Those who do manage to plonk their behinds down for the 50-minute journey – having paid a whisker shy of 25 quid for the privilege – are penned in like battery hens. It is like witnessing a Guinness World Record attempt to see how many people can squeeze into a telephone box.

Then there is the fraught business of getting washed in the toilets like Muller does. It is bad enough trying to do a quick wee without worrying that at any moment the fickle locking system (why does there have to be two buttons?) will fail leaving your smalls exposed to the entire carriage.

And don't get me started on the woeful provision of bike spaces. Book in advance (where's the spontaneity in that?), take pot luck (which doesn't exactly make for stress-free travel) and on many electric trains be scunnered by no dedicated cycle area at all (bikes can only be stored in the vestibule areas as long as you regularly check it is not blocking the way).

The jig is up. If other countries can run rail networks that feel like a home from home, why can't we?